An Assertion
Have we really reached peak water, the point at which the renewable (and safe) supply is forever outstripped by unquenchable demand? Or was Pollyanna right to be glad, and our water woes can be fixed by clever management?
Sure, it’s true, as a recent UN report put it, that global water use has grown at more than twice the rate of the world’s population for the last century, and it’s true that we are drawing down, or overdrafting, many of our water resources at a rate that is unsustainable, and it’s true that we are still polluting water that we should have cleaned up decades ago. But no, we’re not necessarily doomed, and this book will explain why.
A Second Assertion
Looked at one way, the “water crisis” is global. Looked at more closely, the crisis splits into two intersecting and overlapping crises: the crisis of supply (shortages) and the crisis of contamination (pollution). Looked at more correctly, there are no global-scale crises. Instead, there are a thousand smaller regional and river-basin crises, only some of which intersect or overlap with the others, and there are, in fact, still many places without crises at all. This makes water problems more tractable — easier to solve, not harder. This book will delve into that too.
If we can avoid the most deeply irrelevant ideological quarrels to which the water world is so prone (the notion of a callous Big Water cartel that would reserve clean water for the rich, paranoia about bulk water transfers from “us” to “them,” polemics against dams, quarrels over whether water should be defined as a human right), a wide range of techniques will take us very close to solution. Except in spots, of course. Some places are harder. We will need to examine those.
And One More
What’s wrong with privatization? No, really . . . what’s wrong with it?
And a Victim Impact Statement
A Spanish hydrologist, Ramón Llamas Madurga, a contrarian by nature, not long ago annoyed a UNESCO water conference (called Water: The Looming Crisis) by saying, “Why are we always proclaiming that crisis is looming, and yet it never actually looms? With water, we have seemingly been standing on the edge of the cliff of catastrophe for decades, yet we never seem to fall into the abyss.”
He was suggesting, to grumbles from the audience, that the notion of “crisis” might be alarmist. Alarmist and, therefore, unhelpful.
But he was looking, I think, in the wrong places, and at the wrong scale — he was looking for a single, identifiable, overweening global crisis. In many parts of the world, there is no such thing. In others, they have already stumbled over the edge.
For some, it may be too late. But for others, there is still time for a lifeline.
People who write about population policy sometimes forget that “population” is just people in the aggregate: men, women, children, and families going about the business of living their lives, with all their hopes and fears and dreams. Just so, people who write about the “water crisis,” including me, too often fail to consider the actual people whose precious water is poisoned, or scarce, or both — ordinary people who sometimes have to walk great distances to fetch water that is often unclean; people who do it because they must, because without it they cannot survive. We need to remember these people.
The criminal justice system, at sentencing hearings for offenders, allows what it calls Victim Impact Statements from, or about, those most affected. So here is one, about Manya, the senior woman of a household in a small village near the town of Narok in Kenya.
The villagers were members of the Gabbra tribe. I wrote about Manya more than a decade ago, after her family sheltered me from a ferocious riot that had broken out between a group of over-exuberant Maasai warriors and the Kenyan security police. The context of the anecdote was not the riot, however, but water — it described how Manya and her daughters set out, on foot, to fetch water from the nearest well, three kilometres away. Later that evening, the women returned, each with a fifteen-litre pail balanced on her head. They swayed down the trail, singing one of their working songs to pass the hours, as they had done that morning, and as they would do on the days that followed, and as they expected to do, if they thought about it at all, forever. A little later we ate corn mash and fried banana, and sucked on mangos. I declined the water, partly out of politeness and partly out of fear. The well was an old one and had originally been used by fifty families. Now, four times as many drew water from it, and they had to go down further every year. A few months earlier, Manya said, men had descended into the well and had deepened it by two metres or so. The water the buckets brought up was muddy and smelled rank. But they had to drink it, for there was no other. They couldn’t clean it, for they had no money. They couldn’t boil it, for they had no fuel. They had no choice, and no way to choose.
Inside the one-room family hut were a number of children, most of them listless, lying without moving on their pallets. The youngest, who had not yet been named, was dying. Dysentery, probably, for Manya spent more time than she could afford crooning to the baby and cleaning up its diarrhea, which was considerable. She faced the coming death with fortitude. It wouldn’t be the first. There was nothing she could do about it in any case. Nobody seemed to care — even the men of the village didn’t seem to care, though she was circumspect about their callousness. What she cared most about were her elder daughters, those who helped her with her tasks, including fetching water. She had hoped, once, that they would get schooling, sometime, somewhere, but it hadn’t happened. Nobody cared about that either. Certainly the government didn’t care. The Big Men in Nairobi — and the lesser Big Men in Narok — paid the villagers no attention. They didn’t figure in politics. They were just peasants.
Manya’s daughters were trapped by the family’s need for water. She and her daughters were enslaved by this need, though she would never use the word, or even think it. It rippled through the community and beyond. None of the women in her village and in other villages like it — hundreds of them, thousands even — were being schooled. The cost to them and their society is never counted. It’s just how it is.
In one way, Manya’s is a local problem. If it is ever going to be solved, it will have to be solved locally. You can’t help her by being water thrifty in Seattle, or by rationing water in São Paulo, or by desalinating seawater in Perth. But nor is hers just a water problem, to be solved by another well, or a diesel pump, or a solar distiller, though it is that too. Hers is also a political and human development problem, a problem of missed potential — which is a global issue. If you multiply Manya up by her millions, as you must to get a true picture of the world, it becomes a human tragedy.